You’ve a POS System in place at your restaurant – great, that’s the first step to operational success.
But are you using it to its full capacity? We’re not talking about the usual order punching. Well, that’s included, but today, POS offers much more than that.
With each operation that happens in your POS, it becomes more and more powerful to improve processes at your restaurant and optimise your business.
Want to know how? Let’s dig in!
Your POS is much more than a cash register
Think of your POS as a central system, one that compliments the entire functioning of your restaurant. From main features like conducting sale transactions to activities like inventory management and customer engagement – all of it can be supported by a robust restaurant POS system.
Over the years, to further enhance this system, cloud-based functions have come into place. This means you have everything you need in a single straightforward platform and you can also track different metrics for your restaurant, anytime, anywhere.
Different functions an Ideal Restaurant POS Can Power
Restaurants today have so many tools to improve customer experience and it’s important your POS provides or integrates with them. Here are the functions you should be making the most of by using your POS:
Improving Kitchen Efficiency
POS in a simple sentence helps in shortening the order journey from customer to the kitchen. With a cloud POS system, the waiter can send the orders with comments to the kitchen with no extra time. The to and fro is also reduced, making customer service the focus point of the server’s tasks.
Further, POS enables you to have a menu analysis to find out the popular and most profitable items, plan pricing, predict future demand and plan your kitchen operations accordingly.
Recognising and Controlling Theft or Pilferage
Whether it’s keeping track of the stock consumption or identifying the cancelled and void transactions. POS system when utilised well, can help in identifying and controlling theft and pilferage to a big extent. It’s one of the best ways to catch these transactions and understand how and why they happen. POS systems can also help in reducing the human error as they record transactions as and when they happen.
[More on the blog: Quickly master inventory management to control theft at your restaurant]
Improving Communication with Customers
A modern POS is your source of all major data which can be used to conduct various marketing analysis. It also helps in giving a clear picture of customer preferences, divide them into groups, and optimise your communication accordingly.
For example you can send an SMS campaign to customers who haven’t ordered with you in a month, and recapture their interest or you can identify your most popular item and run some offers around it. You can even identify your low order timings from your POS and introduce some discounts or 1+1 offers to improve the performance.
Integrating Loyalty to Drive Repeat Business
When it comes to keeping customers coming back to order, a loyalty program proves to be the most successful tool. It’s important to get a loyalty program that suits the need of your business. Your POS plays an important role here to seamlessly integrate the loyalty with every order.
Here are some actions on which you can add loyalty points in your customer’s account:
- Account registration/first order
- On each new order placed
- On a specific amount of money spent
- On social engagement/reviews/feedback
- On email subscription sign-up
[Also read: How you can promote your loyalty program to get the best results]
Making Sense of Data
A good POS system provides all the necessary information and useful statistics in its reports so you can make the right decision for your restaurant.
It’s important to use the data recorded in the POS to gain insights into trends and business performance and match it with your goals. For owners with multiple outlets, the POS reports are even more helpful to have remote access to the working of business across every outlet.
A few useful metrics to look out for include:
- Sales over a period (by day, week, month, etc.)
- Staff activities (which server handled how many orders, which delivery boys delivered which orders)
- Food usage reports (to see what’s selling and what’s not)
Putting Out Self-Serving-Kiosks
Customers want everything fast. They don’t mind ordering from self-service points, statistics say they actually prefer it. For a restaurant, this provides great automation and less burden on the present staff. You can easily upsell customers by showing great combinations and suggestions on the kiosk itself.
Your Turn to Bring it All Together!
By now you understand that POS offers much more than just the process of sale. When you utilise it for these added features, there are so many positive results you can get like:
- Improved experience for your customers both – online and offline.
- Better management of your restaurant’s resources.
- Full visibility of various activities and staff at your restaurant.
- More insights to plan and set your restaurant’s business goals.
Hope this post helps you in taking the right actions for these results.
